Monthly Archives: September 2014

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

At the top of Jigatake (Old Man Mountain)

Amanda Young reaches the top of Jigatake (Old Man Mountain) on the trail to the peak of Kashimayarigatake, where she is conducting fieldwork on the subalpine forest in the Japanese Alps along with Abby Dolinger (B.A. ’14) and Yosuke Hara.

GOOD NEWS

Petra Tschakert received seed funding from the International Social Science Council, under the Transformations to Sustainability Programme (~30,000 Euro). The grant will allow colleagues at Penn State, the University of Dundee, and NGO partners in India and South Africa to create a network on the role of values in societal transformation.

Joshua Stevens was invited to be a keynote speaker for the annual Minnesota GIS/LIS Consortium occurring this week. His keynote is titled “From Sensemaking to Sharing: The Importance of Design in Geographic Analysis and Communication.”

Audrey Lumley-Sapanski passed her proposal defense last week with flying colors. Her committee members are very excited about her upcoming research with refugee communities in Chicago.

A Human Factors Lab paper, led by Jan Oliver Wallgrun, was accepted at the International Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval. Paper title: “Towards a comprehensive model for interpreting spatial relational expressions.”

NEWS

October 3 Coffee Hour: Marcus Shaffer “The Machine in an Architectural Context: Construction, Destruction, and the Culture of Miracles”
Architects have always designed and fabricated machines as means of realizing their visions. The architect/engineer/priests of ancient times used machines in building construction, to wage war, and “in service to the miracle.” Before them, poets of the Golden Age recorded dreams and stories of automated figures that performed or worked as magical proxies. From the mythical origins of Daedalus to Vitruvius’s de Architectura X: Machines; from Brunelleschi’s building/theater machineries to Le Corbusier’s revolutionary Machine for Living—Architecture’s relationship with the Machine has enriched its theories, built works, and vision.

Fall Newsletter: Call for updates
The Department of Geography fall 2014 newsletter is in development. The theme for this issue is social networks. Alumni, we want to hear from you. If you are working on anything related to the theme, please reply to geography@psu.edu. We also want your personal and professional updates: new job, new spouse, new baby, new award, new accomplishment, new book. Let us know what you are doing.

Tracking a Discipline’s Evolution
Two Kent State University professors frustrated by the lack of analytical data on the evolution of their discipline have compiled all of the field’s doctoral dissertations into a database to track growth and changes in the field. Professors David Kaplan and Jennifer Mapes (M.S. ‘05) hope their study will provide geographers with a comprehensive overview of shifts in the regions and topics of interest from the ground up.

Student uses technology to track French writers’ 19th-century social networks
Authors today have it rough. They compete with millions to get book deals from (mostly) the same five publishing houses, so unless they know someone in the biz or have a massive following on social media, it can seem impossible to get signed. With the pressure today to connect with potential agents and publishers online and at conferences, it’s tempting to think writers 100 years ago may have had it easier. But Hélène Huet says that’s not necessarily the case.

Residual hydraulic fracturing water not a risk to groundwater
Hydraulic fracturing — fracking or hydrofracturing — raises many concerns about potential environmental impacts, especially water contamination. Currently, data show that the majority of water injected into wells stays underground, triggering fears that it might find its way into groundwater. New research by a team of scientists should help allay those fears.

Recently (or soon to be) Published

Wayfinding Behaviors in Complex Buildings: The Impact of Environmental Legibility and Familiarity
By Rui Li and Alexander Klippel
In Environment and Behavior
To contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of human wayfinding behaviors in complex buildings, we propose a framework that incorporates the impact of critical factors from both the environment and humans. The influence of the environment is summarized through the concept of environmental legibility (EL), an integration of different space syntax methods that addresses visibility, connectivity, and layout complexity of buildings. Human factors are assessed through psychometric tests, self-ratings for sense of direction, and a report of familiarity. To test this framework, we conducted behavioral experiments involving 24 novices and 28 experts. Three different processes of wayfinding—wayfinding performance, acquisition of spatial knowledge, and development of spatial awareness—were measured and evaluated. Results show that EL and individual differences impact all three processes. There is a predominant impact of EL on wayfinding performance and the development of spatial awareness. Not surprisingly, familiarity has a predominant impact on the acquisition of spatial knowledge.

DOG OF THE WEEK

Who is this dog? Who is his human?

Send your answer and/or a photo of your dog to geography@psu.edu for our mystery dog of the week!

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

A successful test flight

The Octocopter hovers successfully as Courtney Jackson and Alexander Savelyev (not pictured) learn and test programming the flightpath of the UAV for Guido Cervone’s research project on the use of UAVs and Social Media to assess environmental hazards.

International migration is one of the top concerns for the public and the governments of most countries. It is an unavoidable component of globalization, largely beneficial to sending and receiving nations, but it also exports to developed countries the insecurities of the developing world and challenges the persistence in their essential character of the receiving societies, producing big fears.

Next Week: Marcus Shaffer

Search underway for tenure track faculty position in human security and global ethics
The Department of Geography at The Pennsylvania State University invites applications for a tenure track faculty position at the assistant or associate professor rank. We seek a geographer, or a scholar working in closely related fields, whose research focuses on human security and global ethics. We will consider candidates with expertise in people-centered approaches to human security and who address societal challenges such as human health, environmental and climatic change, conflict, poverty reduction, and development. This position will also contribute to ongoing departmental initiatives on justice, equity and fair distributions of risks. It is expected that the new faculty member will combine cutting-edge theoretical expertise and a strong commitment to teaching with engagement in research that is well positioned for extramural funding. We seek candidates that adhere to Penn State’s tripartite mission of excellence in research, teaching and service.

Meet the woman behind Ikea’s living wage calculator
Scandinavian furniture store Ikea recently announced it will adopt a new, higher wage structure at its U.S. stores in 2015. The company says its average hourly minimum wage will go up to $10.76, an increase of 17 percent. That’s big news, but there was a footnote to that announcement that’s worth pausing on. In this new wage structure, Ikea’s lowest wages will be based on something called the MIT Living Wage Calculator. How did one MIT professor’s research project become a tool that will affect the wages of thousands of American workers? The story begins with Amy Glasmeier, a professor of economic geography and regional planning at MIT.

University fall holidays and closures
The Thanksgiving holiday will be observed on Thursday, November 27 and the University will remain closed on Friday, November 28. Winter break: University offices and operations, except for essential services, will close at the normal end-of-business times on Tuesday, December 23, and will resume at normal starting times on Monday, January 5.

DOG OF THE WEEK

The previous mystery dog was Tigger, companion to Susan Lechtanski (B.S. ‘97). Send a photo of your dog for our mystery dog of the week!

Structural connectivity is often hailed as critical for aquatic ecosystem function. Channel-floodplain connectivity promotes nutrient and sediment redistribution and water-purification reactions such as denitrification, while longitudinal connectivity provides corridors for transport of organic matter and organisms. Large-scale connectivity can also enhance resilience by facilitating transport and replenishment of organisms, sediment, and/or nutrients lost during a disturbance. However, connectivity can also promote the spread of catastrophe to large scales through the communication of information (e.g., as in popular forest fire models in terrestrial systems).

EMS freshmen bond in nature, overcome jitters through orientation program
Everyone has heard of — or experienced — the freshman jitters. But throw in campfires and s’mores, boating and swimming, cooking challenges and scavenger hunts, add faculty, staff, upperclassmen and alumni to the mix and you have a freshmen orientation experience designed to overcome those jitters — the Total Orientation Trip for Earth and Mineral Sciences. Otherwise known as TOTEMS, it is a three-day orientation program for first-year students in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences (EMS).

RECENTLY (or soon to be) PUBLISHED

Book Review: An introduction to landscape by Peter J. Howard
By Kirby Calvert in The Canadian Geographer
The intention of the book is clear and well executed: to offer a broad overview of the concept of landscape that is intelligible and useful to interdisciplinary research(ers) studying environment-society relations. Issue-oriented information capsules and chapter-by-chapter work exercises bring depth to the material and make it easier for the reader to extend the concepts discussed in the text beyond the covers of the book.

DOG OF THE WEEK

The previous mystery dog was Michaela, companion to Clio Andris. Guido Cervone was the first to respond with the correct answer.

Who is this dog? Who is his human?

Send your answer to geography@psu.edu along with a photo of your dog for our mystery dog of the week!

Groundwater constitutes a critical component of our water resources, especially during dry seasons and droughts, and in regions lacking reliable access to surface water. This seminar will cover the results of groundwater studies at two scales: the continental-scale study reveals groundwater depletion trends and the basin-scale study explores a new method for identifying groundwater restoration project sites.

Recently (or soon to be) Published

Cognitive evaluation of spatial formalisms: Intuitive granularities of overlap relations.
By Wallgrün, J. O., Yang, J., & Klippel, A.
In International Journal of Cognitive Informatics and Natural Intelligence, 8(1), 1–17.
The authors present four human behavioral experiments to address the question of intuitive granularities in fundamental spatial relations as they can be found in formal spatial calculi. These calculi focus on invariant characteristics under certain (especially topological) transformations. Of particular interest to this article is the concept of two spatially extended entities overlapping each other. The overlap concept has been extensively treated in Galton’s mode of overlap calculus (Galton 1998). In the first two experiments, we used a category construction task to calibrate this calculus against behavioral data and found that participants adopted a very coarse view on the concept of overlap and distinguished only between three general relations: proper part, overlap, and non-overlap. In the following two experiments, we changed the instructions to explicitly address the possibility that humans could be swayed to adopt a more detailed level of granularity, that is, we encouraged them to create as many meaningful groups as possible. The results show that the three relations identified in the first two experiments (overlap, non-overlap, and proper part) are very robust and a natural level of granularity across all four experiments. However, the results also reveal that contextual factors gain more influence at finer levels of granularity.

Improving the representation of roots in terrestrial models
By Erica A. H. Smithwick, Melissa S. Lucash, M. Luke McCormack, Gajan Sivandran,
In Ecological Modelling, Volume 291, 10 November 2014, Pages 193–204
Root biomass, root production and lifespan, and root-mycorrhizal interactions govern soil carbon fluxes and resource uptake and are critical components of terrestrial models. However, limitations in data and confusions over terminology, together with a strong dependence on a small set of conceptual frameworks, have limited the exploration of root function in terrestrial models. We review the key root processes of interest to both field ecologists and modelers including root classification, production, turnover, biomass, resource uptake, and depth distribution to ask (1) what are contemporary approaches for modeling roots in terrestrial models? and (2) can these approaches be improved via recent advancements in field research methods?

DOG OF THE WEEK

Last week’s mystery dog was Jack, belonging to Paulo Raposo. Eun-Kyeong Kim was the first to respond with the correct answer.

Who is this dog? Who is her human?

Send your answer to geography@psu.edu along with a photo of your dog for our mystery dog of the week!